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Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Simple Suggestions For Mastering Effective Web Design

By Odelia Morar

If
you're a web designer make sure that you create a work space for
yourself that will offer the least amount of distractions. This will
allow you to focus on your work and will result in a more productive and
efficient business atmosphere.

Good web design includes some white space in your overall layout. The
most important thing on your site is the quality content and the
effective use of white space on your page will direct the users' eye to
your content. Avoid cluttering your page with useless information just
to fill up every space.

A great tip for every web designer out there is to research their target
audience. Understanding what type of people will be using the site is
an excellent way to decide how to build it. Make sure it is a site that
the target audience will be comfortable using.

Those of you who are looking for a solid web design tip might want to
look into top level domains. Most people are only familiar with the
popular .com, .net and .org, so make sure that these are available for
your website in order to get as much traffic as possible.

If you plan on having a commercial site, you should seriously consider
buying your own web hosting. Most free host sites force you to display
their advertisements, which is counter-intuitive if you are attempting
to sell something as well. Purchase your own hosting to avoid this
advertising hassle, so that you can choose your own ads.

Optimize every image you use for the web. If you look through the
internet, you can find a lot of examples of images that are too large
and they slow down the webpage's load time. Make sure you have optimized
each image you use. Save the image as a JPEG or GIF and aim for the
file size to be somewhere between 5k and 20k.

Focusing on your target audience is important even for website design.
For instance, if you're designing a site in order to sell winter coats,
you're not exactly going to have a beach themed background with Joe
Strummer tunes playing upon entry. Keep your site closely related to its
targeted audience.

Make sure that you use the right anchor text. The anchor text of a link
should clearly describe what the visitor should expect to see when he
clicks on the link. For instance, if a link leads to your widget
ordering page, the anchor text might read "Order widgets." Specifically
avoid using "click here" as anchor text.

Make sure your site includes a search box. This is really important,
because people are accustomed to having that function, and when they
want to find something on your site, they need to be able to find it. If
they can't find what they need, they may leave your site altogether.

Always make sure that your site design works well on every browser. Your
coding might look great in Firefox, but it could be askew in Internet
Explorer. You need to find out exactly how things look in all browsers
and then code in a way that leaves your site looking the same on every
popular browser.

When you decide on a domain name to choose try your best to choose one
that is going to draw people's attention. You don't want to pick a
domain name this is going to deter people from coming to your site,
names are everything and what draw people in, so take this into
consideration when thinking of a name.

Think of cellphone users when designing your site. More people than ever
before are using their mobile phone to surf the internet. If they
cannot access your site or if it can't be viewed well on their phone,
they will likely stay away from your site. That can cost you a lot of
business.

While you might be inclined to add a lot of bells and whistles to your
website, flashing graphics, loud music and neon colors will just
distract from the purpose of your website. Visitors who are bombarded by
too many sights and sounds might be inclined to leave your website
before they even start browsing. Keep the colors simple and the content
relevant and your website design will be a winner.

To wrap it up, you were not sure of the important role that web design
plays in a company's success, but now you have quite a good feel for it.
Ideally, this article will be more than enough to enable you to pass
this information on and help other people with the same questions.